MARATHON — When Bonnie Bletsoe bought her Marathon cheese factory 30 years ago, she never dreamed it would be anything more than a supplier for Pauly Cheese Co. in Wausau.

But about two years after opening, Pauly Cheese Co. went out of business.

“All of a sudden, they closed up and didn’t want to buy any more of our 40-pound blocks,” Bletsoe said, recalling her fear at the time. “We didn’t have a market, so we had to go to the government.”

Bletsoe began working tirelessly to build a new market. Today, the company has 200 grocery stores, restaurants and bars, both in and out of state, that order Bletsoe’s cheese and famous cheese curds on a regular basis. The factory makes 4,000 pounds of cheese a day out of two large vats.

Question: What does your business do and what makes it special?

Answer: It’s a family business on the third generation of Bletsoes and we’re still doing it the old way out of the vats like they did 40 or 50 years ago. With anything that’s mass produced, you lose the love in the cheese. People say it tastes like it used to taste.

Q: Why did you choose central Wisconsin as a place to do business?

A: Central Wisconsin is great for us to distribute because we have quite a few cities in a 100-mile radius so it works very will with our routes.

Q: What might people be surprised to learn about you, your business or your employees?

A: Probably the amount of employees. We only have about ten. We use an independent milk hauler and we get all of our milk from local farmers, a lot of the same ones ever since we opened. I also don’t think people realize that we’re still hands on doing it the old way.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who’s starting a business in central Wisconsin?

A: Start slow. Don’t try to do everything at once. I took it slow because I couldn’t afford everything at one time. I still don’t have a seller on the road. I call each of my accounts every week to take their orders.

Q: What is your long-term vision for the future of the company?

A: To stay on track and keep doing what we’re doing. If we come up with a few new flavors, that always helps because people are always looking for something new.